CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Among the fundamental questions raised by the Arab uprisings is when contentious collective action that challenges the state likely to emerge? While some scholars point to fundamental grievances as fueling social discontent, others note that grievances alone are rarely sufficient to turn dissatisfaction with economic or political conditions into sustained social mobilization.Footnote ² Rather, these analysts point out that other factors must be present for grievances to be turned into sustained protest. These factors include the availability of resources, both material and symbolic, regime opponents can draw on; the resonance of diagnostic and prescriptive frames; changes in political opportunity structures; and the international context.Footnote ³ Here, I focus in particular on these two latter issues.

Changing political opportunity structure can significantly alter people's assessments of the risks and opportunities of challenging the state. The emergence of fissures among the ruling elite, for instance, are often accompanied by the appearance of elite allies willing to make common cause with social groups. The state also often becomes either less willing or less able to deploy repression thus signaling to the regime's opponents that challenging authority might be less costly and more likely to succeed. In other words, as Goldstone and Tilly point out, contentious collective action is more frequent when the perceived, “probability that social protest action will lead to success in achieving desired outcome.”Footnote ⁴

How do social actors assess whether conditions have changed and become more hospitable to mobilization? How do potential regime challengers perceive that changes in the political opportunity structure have taken place? After all, the model assumes that social actors have the ability to access sufficient information to engage in rational analysis about whether to take action. This assumption, however, cannot always be made. The Arab uprisings provide students with an opportunity to explore how different political contexts shape the availability of information and how, in environments where information is scarce, social actors decide to engage in contentious collective action. In particular, the dynamics of information gathering and assessment is different in authoritarian contexts, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, than in more pluralistic political settings. As Beinin and Vairel note in a recent study, in authoritarian settings discerning whether there has been a change in the political opportunity structure might be difficult.Footnote ⁵

Equally challenging for social actors is accurately assessing how others in society view the regime and whether, if protests are launched, there are sufficient social allies to build a robust challenge to the regime. This is because in authoritarian and repressive contexts individuals often engage in preference falsification and do not readily reveal attitudes about the regime.Footnote ⁶ Exploring these dynamics by drawing on the experiences of the Arab uprisings allows students to flesh out these theoretical concepts. It also provides them with an opportunity to consider how theoretical models of social mobilization dynamics, developed by primarily drawing on Western examples, can be utilized to understand contentious dynamics in non-Western contexts. Students can explore how these models have been modified by scholars of East Central European and Central Asian social mobilizations and how they might be modified to help us understand dynamics in the Middle East.

THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

The Arab uprisings have produced a new wave of comparative research on the processes of political change and transitions from authoritarianism. Comparisons have been made between the changes in the Middle East and the 1989 fall of communism when popular protests also quickly spread through East Central Europe.Footnote ⁷ The fall of communism and the pace at which political changes unfolded surprised the region's observers just as the Arab uprisings surprised students of the Middle East.Footnote ⁸ Before the upheavals regimes in both regions were viewed as stable, resilient, and capable and willing to repress those challenging their authority.Footnote ⁹ Analysts have also compared the Arab uprisings with the wave of popular protests in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan during the 2000s that are now known as the Color Revolutions, which erupted in response to fraudulent elections. Unlike 1989 in East Central Europe, however, the Color Revolutions proved better able at toppling authoritarian regimes than in constructing democratic alternatives.Footnote ¹⁰ By comparing the Arab uprisings with the divergent dynamics of these two prior waves of popular challenge to authoritarian regimes gives students opportunities to explore how different initial conditions—both within states as well as in the international context—influence the dynamics of these encounters between citizens and the state as well as the processes of political transitions from authoritarianism. Here I focus on the benefits of comparing Arab uprisings and political transitions in East Central Europe.

There were some key differences between how popular challenges to authoritarian rule unfolded in 1989 in East Central Europe and in the Middle East beginning in late 2010. The East Central European wave began following the June 1989 partially free elections in Poland that brought the political movement and trade union Solidarity to power. When the Soviet Union leader Gorbachev made clear that Moscow would not intervene in internal Polish affairs, it signaled to potential regime challengers in other countries in the region that the international context had become more favorable to pressing demands for political change.Footnote ¹¹ Within months, communist regimes fell in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Romania. What was remarkable about these transitions was their pace as well as the relatively low levels of violence that accompanied them. Only in Romania did the uprising turn violent and protesters executed President Ceausescu and his wife Elena.Footnote ¹² In Yugoslavia, which unlike the other countries in the region lay outside of the Soviet sphere of influence, the transition path diverged significantly and the country disintegrated into a bloody years-long civil war.Footnote ¹³

Popular uprisings spread differently in the Middle East. The fall of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisian and Egypt respectively happened in quick succession. However, unlike in East Central Europe, other countries in the region did not follow a similar path. Instead, contentious encounters between citizens and authoritarian regimes unfolded along multiple, diverse routes. In Libya, the uprising by opposition forces centered in Benghazi sparked a months-long civil war and a NATO-led intervention that resulted in Qaddafi's death and regime change; in Yemen, violent confrontations with the regime eventually led to President Saleh's departure but not to a political transition; in Syria, the confrontation between the Assad regime and its challengers quickly turned violent, leading to what seemed by mid-2012 like an intractable civil war; in Bahrain, the opposition movement was brutally suppressed by the regime with the assistance of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council members although protests continued to erupt periodically.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast, compared to the experience of East Central Europe, what is striking about the Arab uprising dynamics is that many countries in the Middle East experienced relatively few protests. Many regimes successfully used a mix of both carrots and sticks to ensure that they did not face a significant challenge to their authority or successfully weathered popular pressures for political change.

What accounts for these differing patterns of contentious encounters between citizens and authoritarian regimes in East Central Europe and in the Middle East? By examining these two waves of contentious collective action in a comparative context, students can critically interrogate extant theories of social mobilization, political transitions, and the role of the international context in facilitating or hindering processes of political change. For instance, can the similarities among East Central European cases and divergence among Middle Eastern cases be explained by the regime types in the two regions when protests began spreading? Although differences among countries in East Central Europe certainly existed, all these states had regimes that shared a number of common features. Most important, all were states were political power was concentrated in the hands of the communist party.Footnote ¹⁵ The Middle East, in contrast, was populated by a variety of different regime types, including military regimes, monarchies, and dominant-party states. Several scholars of regime survival and political transitions have noted that different regime-types have different life spans and while some, for instance monarchies, are quite stable, others, like military regimes, are less so.Footnote ¹⁶ Do these differences in regime type prior to the emergence of popular uprisings explain the patterns of the contentious encounters between citizens and the state and the dynamics of political transitions? And if so, how did they shape these processes and dynamics? Alternatively, was it the difference in the international context that accounted for these differences between the two regions? Incorporating the Arab uprisings into survey courses allows students to both explore these key questions and to think about the Middle East in comparative rather than exceptional terms.

A number of scholars have argued that what differentiates patterns of political transition in East Central Europe from those in the Middle East is the more permissive international environment in which the East Central European's transitions unfolded. Especially significant was the refusal of the Soviet Union to prop up communist regimes in 1989 and the support from the European Union in strengthening the fledgling democracies. These conditions, they argue, do not exist in the Middle East, where the West has been historically ambivalent about supporting political openings because of the fear of potential Islamist ascendance to power and the interest in maintaining secure access to the region's oil resources.Footnote ¹⁷

The juxtaposition of these periods of contentious politics in the two regions allows students to consider the relationship between the global and the local in facilitating or hindering political transitions. It also invites them to assess critically how these global factors change over time. For instance, when exploring the influence that external actors play in shaping local dynamics in 2010 or 2012 does it still make sense to focus just on relations with the West? Or have the fundamental changes in the global environment of the past 20 years, and in particular the rise of the emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil or, in the case of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, necessitate rethinking which external actors, with what goals and strategic objectives and through what mechanisms, influence local political dynamics and with what consequences?Footnote ¹⁸

DIFFUSION OF CONTENTION

The Arab uprisings have also renewed interest in and debates about contentious collective action diffusion processes. Historically we know that waves of contention have tended to be concentrated geographically. But why? A number of different approaches have investigated this question, and new studies have already appeared, exploring these most recent uprisings in a comparative framework.Footnote ¹⁹ Diffusion occurs through a number of mechanisms. One way is through the intentional action of international activists who train opposition movement representatives to effectively engage authoritarian regimes by using nonviolent tactics. Significant evidence suggests that this direct process of diffusion occurred during the Color Revolutions.Footnote ²⁰ Diffusion can also be explained through processes of social learning. Social learning appears to be especially powerful when protests are taking place in neighboring countries that share linguistic, religious, and historical backgrounds. As Tilly points out, “within a given region and period many states share political arrangements, national and international, [and] rough similarities and explicable variation appear in the experiences of connected states and revolutions.”Footnote ²¹

New communications technologies, for instance satellite TV, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones, mean that information can spread more quickly, and social learning is therefore accelerated. Of course, social learning is not restricted to potential regime opponents. Rather, authoritarian regimes, drawing on the same communications technologies do not remain passive in the face of protests in neighboring countries. Instead they also adjust their responses to more effectively meet new challenges to their authority.Footnote ²² For instance, in the Middle East, governments used a mix of carrots, raising public sector workers' salaries and increasing basic consumer good subsidies, and sticks, deploying security forces in public spaces and raising fears about potential disorder, sectarian violence, and economic debacle.Footnote ²³ Likewise, authoritarian rulers in Central Asia watched carefully the unfolding Arab uprisings and took steps to prevent similar challenges in their own countries.Footnote ²⁴ As a result, as protests diffuse across borders, the later protests often have a lower probability of success. Diffusion can also occur because protests in one country can signal to activists in neighboring states that the political opportunity structure might be changing and becoming more hospitable to challenging authoritarian regimes.

The Arab uprisings thus allow students to critically examine how changes in political opportunity structures shape the processes of protest diffusion across borders. As scholars of social movements point out changes in political opportunity structure encourage social mobilization in opposition to the regime only if social actors recognize that such change has occurred. In authoritarian settings, as noted earlier, this can be especially challenging. However, even in more politically pluralistic settings, most individuals are not willing to incur costs that testing the degree of change usually requires. It is rather what Tarrow has called the “early risers” who engage in actions that test and potentially expose a state's increased vulnerability to collective challenge.Footnote ²⁵ When it becomes clear that protests are possible, the number of participants in mobilization can quickly swell.Footnote ²⁶

The popular uprisings in East Central Europe and in the Middle East show that even in authoritarian settings, where gauging the degree of change in political opportunity structure is difficult, early risers' actions can encourage others to also challenge the regime. Through signaling across border, protests can spread rapidly through a region. The actions of early risers, Tunisia in the Middle East and Poland in East Central Europe, signaled to others within their societies that the environment may have become more hospitable to social mobilization. But early risers can also alert social actors in neighboring states that conditions now may be more conducive to challenging authoritarian regimes. As Przeworski has pointed out, “as development took place in one country, people elsewhere were updating their probabilities of success and as the next country went over the brink, the calculation was becoming increasingly reassuring.”Footnote ²⁷ In other words, demonstration effects can alter perceptions of political opportunities beyond national borders and influence dynamics of political transition in other countries.Footnote ²⁸

Furthermore, as the diffusion of contentious collective action in East Central Europe showed, the domestic political opportunity structure in a particular country can be a poor predictor of whether a challenge to the regime would emerge and if it would be successful. Rather, what seemed to be as, if not more, important for encouraging contentious collective action was the signaling across borders. Until the fall of communist regimes, the impact that demonstration effects could have on neighboring countries' conflict dynamics was often underappreciated by analysts. Beissinger argues, however, that the 1989 transitions clearly showed that in cases he defines as “modular phenomenon,” “the influence of example can substitute to some extent for structural disadvantages, allowing some groups that might be less structurally advantaged to engage in successful action by riding the influence of the prior example.”Footnote ²⁹ Modular phenomena tend to cluster among cases that share commonalities of geography, history, culture, or religion where signaling of possible success is more readily understood and translated into the local context.

Signaling across state borders, however, is not always reliable. As contentious collective action spreads geographically and temporally from its point of origin, the probability of success of later protests diminishes. This happens for two reasons: one is that authoritarian regimes have time to learn how to more effectively respond to these challenges; and two, the political opportunity structures of late-comers can be significantly different and hence much less hospitable to social mobilization. Furthermore, although the example of early risers' successful experience of confrontation with an authoritarian regime can make local structural disadvantages less significant, the local context, nonetheless, continues to shape each countries' particular dynamics of contentious politics. By exploring these divergent influences through a close analysis of a range of cases in both East Central Europe and the Middle East, students can critically engage with these theoretical concepts and puzzle through how transnational demonstration effects and diffusion interact with the local context and shape the particular paths of each country's contentious encounters between citizens and states.